


Defeat

by mtjester



Series: Insurrectionbent [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Pirates, Space Pirates, Subjuggulators, laughssassin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 13:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mtjester/pseuds/mtjester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since leaving Alternia, Vriska managed to bring together a group of incompetent trolls who, under her capable command, have become a successful team of intergalactic pirates. When she and her crew accidentally cross paths with a Laughssassin, however, their criminal careers come to an abrupt end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Defeat

**Author's Note:**

> Set before the events of [Insurrection for Desperate Dreamers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/629667/chapters/1138507)
> 
> [Chapter theme](http://mtjester.tumblr.com/post/44818722846/for-defeat-part-of-insurrectionbent-a-mix-of)

Vriska was nearly ready to flip the table.  She had been having a round of good luck lately, so she took the opportunity to get in on a game of dice with some of the rowdy pirates stalking the crime-ridden backstreets of Tantopia, the capital city of Planet A72.  But she had misread her fortune.  Her bad luck was back full-force, and she was on the verge of gambling away everything, even her modest but beautiful ship that was currently getting much-needed repairs.  She howled in frustration as the menacing rustblood scooped up the last of her recently plundered loot.

“Care to go another round?” he asked, shaking the dice at her.  She glared at him, her fingers twitching towards the dice.  Her first mate, a stocky yellow blood who somehow always managed to look confused despite his near-perfect understanding of the mechanics of the physical universe, hovered over her shoulder, making jittery little noises of protest and anguish.

“Shut up, Newkon,” she snapped at him, giving into the bait and grabbing the dice.  He moaned, pulling his hat down over his curling horns.

“We’re going to lose _everything!_ ” he cried in despair.  “Our ship, captain!  Our crew!  You’re going to bet it all away!”

“You mean _my_ ship and _my_ crew,” she said with a growl, “and I’ll bet whatever I want!”

She was about to throw the dice when a loud commotion sprang up down the street.  Loud commotions weren’t uncommon in that part of Tantopia.  In fact, they were considered an acceptable way to do business.  This wasn’t the business kind of commotion, however. The cry that caught everyone’s attention and turned heads up and down the street was the panic-stricken call of _Laughssasin_.

Newkon released a loud and explosive sigh of relief as Vriska put down the dice and stood up, accompanied by the rustblood who seemed to forget that he was a dice-throw away from owning the clothes on her back.  Tension was beginning to bristle along the street, entering into pubs and illicit stores and drawing out crowds of trolls and natives alike.  The commotion was slowly making its way towards them, bringing with it a wave of delirious people.

“I saw him with my own eyes!” a man was screaming, tugging on his hair and stumbling back and forth, grabbing at anyone he saw watching him.  “He was wearing the mirthful purple!  A Subjugglator!  Covered in the blood of my matesprit!  Those eyes!  _Those eyes!_   He’s here to kill us all!  They’ve sent a Laughssassin to cull all our asses!”

He passed by Vriska, screaming and cursing and sometimes laughing hysterically as he jerked and tumbled down the street.  A chill followed him, shivering through the spectators.  No one spoke.

“Newkon, what are you still standing here for?” Vriska barked, rounding on Newkon.  He hastily stiffened into a sloppy salute.

“Captain, your orders!”

“Get back to the ship and get everything set for takeoff!  We’re getting out of this shithole.”

“Captain, the ship isn’t ready yet!”

“Get it ready, dumbass!  Unless you want to meet a Laughssassin, but I sure as hell don’t.”

“I don’t either, captain!” he said, and he hurried down the street towards the docks.

“Sorry, buddy, looks like we won’t be continuing our game today, but hey, it was fun,” she said to the rustblood, walking past him in the other direction.  Without pausing to catch his reaction, she grabbed a handful of her lost loot and took off down the street, shoving it in her pocket.  She heard him shout, but she kept going, cackling to herself.  Rustbloods were so gullible.

She ran until she was out of the black market section of the slums, finally stopping to rest when she had made it to the more forgiving commercial district.  She ignored the odd looks she received from the various merchants and business sharks who obviously didn’t know what a big deal she was in the field of intergalactic piracy.  Their boring and uneventful lives made it impossible for them to appreciate her mechanical arm and eye patch.  She smirked, secretly ridiculing them for their foolishness.

She found herself a secluded corner to lean into, and then she reached out with her mind, calling the rest of her crew to her.  They would reconvene and make their way back to the ship, which Newkon would doubtlessly have ready and waiting for them.  He was a spastic know-it-all, but she could always trust him to get shit together in a pinch. 

Slowly, the other six members of her crew came to her.  They were a mix of different bloods, only two of them possessing any psychic traits, but all of them were mentally susceptible to her mind powers.  She didn’t need her psychic abilities to control her crew, but it was good to inspire a little awe and fear in her subordinates.

“There’s a Laughssasin in town,” she declared, “so we’re going to go somewhere else for repairs.”

They all groaned.  The next pirate-friendly port was a solar system away, and it wasn’t anywhere near as entertaining as Tantopia.

“I don’t want to hear any bitching!  My ship needs some serious work, but do I look like I’m bitching?  No, I’m not, because I don’t wanna get culled by a Laughssasin!”

“How do we know the Laughssasin will come after us?” her mechanic asked.  He was a useless piece of shit, dumb as a box of rocks, but Vriska kept him around because he had mad skills with a rocket launcher.  And in an emergency, he could do tune-ups on her arm, but luckily it hadn’t come to that yet.  Equius was always willing to help her maintain her artificial limb for a small price, as long as she snuck to him in secret so he could pretend to disagree with her lifestyle.

“Do you wanna stick around and find out?” she asked.  Turning to the rest of the trolls, she asked, “Who wants to see if the Laughssasin will come after us?  Anyone?”

They all shook their heads with varying levels of hesitation.

“Great,” she said.  “Meet up at the ship in an hour.  And don’t come empty handed!  There are all these hapless dunces walking around asking for stolen pocket watches, so don’t disappoint me!”

They broke, and Vriska strolled away, searching the minds of the crowd around her for the most malleable people she could find.  The natives of A72 were a ridiculously simple species for all their adaptability, and she was soon leading a reasonably large group of them to the park, where they proceeded to relinquish all their valuables.  She usually didn’t stoop to this kind of mean thievery, but since she had just lost most of her money in a game of dice, she needed something to get her ship off the ground.  She repeated the act a couple more times, quickly earning herself a small fortune off of the well-to-do businessmen and women of Tantopia.  Snickering, she made her way to the docks, where she fully expected to find her crew and ship ready for a quick getaway.

But of course they weren’t ready, because her whole crew was a bunch of idiots who couldn’t appreciate the amount of work she did for them.  Seriously, if they had even the shadow of something resembling competency, she could have so many more irons in the fire.  Not for the first time, she missed the days when she and Terezi used to FLARP together as Team Scourge, destroying masses of pathetic wigglers with their tact and cunning.  Terezi had always had her shit together.  Hell, even Eridan hadn’t been so bad.  Her current crew, on the other hand, was completely unreliable, and it was a miracle they hadn’t been captured by a Legislacerator yet.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded, approaching them as they loitered around the ship.  “Why aren’t you in the ship?  We should already be in space!”

“Our ship’s been disabled, captain,” Newkon responded.

“Whaaaaaaaat?”

“All the ships have been disabled, captain.”

“How?  By who?”

He shifted uncomfortably and then pointed to the side of the ship.  Something was painted over their coat of arms, two dots above a circle over another half circle:

:o)

She gaped up at it, growing angry and not a little nervous.  “This happened to all the ships?” she asked, turning back to Newkon.  He nodded, looking a little pale in the face.  The rest of her crew looked equally afraid.

“They found bodies,” her linguist piped up.  “Half of the Cosmowrath’s crew is already dead.”

She stared at them, trying to keep her emotions in check.  She thought about her ancestor, searching for wisdom to draw from the exploits recorded in Mindfang’s journal, a habit that had become borderline obsessive since she had begun her ultimate quest to follow in Mindfang's footsteps.  Mindfang had gotten out of tighter situations than this.  What was one Laughssassin to Vriska?  She just needed a plan, and that was all there was to it.

“Have you tried to repair it?” she asked Newkon, but then she remembered that her mechanic was a waste of space and didn’t pause to pay attention to his answer.  She broke from the group, pacing as she considered her options.  If Kanaya hadn’t convinced her to give up on all forms of dark prognostication, she would be cycling through black oracles for answers and promptly breaking them in frustration for their vague replies.  It would have made her feel better, at least.

“Captain?” Newkon said, approaching her.  She looked at him.  “In any case, we should find a place to stay tonight.  It’s probably a bad idea to stay here...” 

The rest of the crew nodded.

“Fine,” she said, and, motioning for them to follow her, they made their way back into the city.  Thinking it prudent to avoid the black market center, where many criminals and wanted pirates might draw unwanted attention, they found modest accommodations in a quiet and inconspicuous neighborhood in the lower slums.  Her crew, as they were wont to do whenever they spent the night in a port, found ways to get drunk and flirt with the locals.  She and Newkon abstained.  Normally, she would join them.  She loved drinking competitions, and she was getting close to out-drinking their medic, which was a feat to brag about.  Her mind was still on the Laughssassin, however, and she knew better to get shit-faced in the middle of a crisis, even if her idiot crew didn’t.  Newkon just never drank.  He was pretty much the resident buzz-kill.  They both went to bed long before the rest of the crew stumbled in.

When in the morning she was jarred awake by an extremely nervous Newkon, she was glad she fell asleep early.  As a response to her angry complaints, he beckoned for her to look out the window.  There was thick, black smoke billowing from several parts of the city.

“What...?”

“I’ve gathered news from the locals, captain,” he whispered.  “No one really knows what happened.  It sounds like there were disputes between several groups last night.  They all said they found evidence that another group sabotaged their ship and that they were just playing it off like it was a Laughssassin.  Fighting broke out.”

“What a bunch of dumbasses,” she murmured.  “Now see, Newkon, that’s why I brought us to this part of the city instead.  You can never trust anyone in that shithole.”

“Captain, it was my idea to come here...”

“Respect authority, Newkon!” she replied, smirking at his pout.  She looked out the window and folded her arms, surveying the scene.  After a minute, she pointed to the smoke and fire that was enveloping more civilized areas of the city.  “What’s the story there?” she asked.  He shook his head.

“I don’t know, captain.  No one does.  Some people are saying there isn’t really a Laughssassin around, and this is all a set-up to fuel a turf war.  But there have been a lot of unexplained deaths.”

“How many deaths?”

“A _lot_ , captain.”

“ _All_ the deaths?”

“...Captain.”

“Continue.”

“Well, it sounds like they’re all pretty mysterious and, well, gruesome.”

She scowled.  “Whoever’s behind this is a schemer, and it looks like they’re pretty damn good at it.”

“Better than you, captain?”

“Of course not!” she said, throwing her hair over her shoulder for effect.  “Don’t worry so much, Newkon.  You’re always worrying!  We’ve had a few bad breaks in the past, but has that ever stopped us?  No, because I’m pretty much amazing.  I’ll get us out of this, no sweat.”

He smiled.  “Of course, captain.”

They spent the next hour trying to wake the rest of the crew, which was proving to be a difficult feat.  Finally, Vriska started kicking people out of beds, and before they realized they weren’t in control of their physical bodies they were marching themselves out of the door and down the street. 

When they set off, Vriska was hoping that their mechanic could get his shit together long enough to get their ship off the ground, but it became apparent long before they got to the docks that there was no hope for that.  The mass of smoke hovering above the docks could be seen from half the city away.  Despite her crew’s pathetic lamentations and attempts to comfort her, Vriska refused to accept what her eyes were telling her.  She ordered them into a hasty jog, and they were all stumbling over themselves in exhaustion as they arrived at the edge of the inferno that had consumed the ships and stalls in and around the docks.  There was no way to approach what had been her ship, her prize possession, her beautiful spacecraft that had taken her so long to acquire, now lost to the flames.  She fell to her knees.

People were running back and forth, calling to each other over the roar of the fire and trying to quell the flames.  Shops and homes were catching and burning.  They heard snatches of terrible arguments as people blamed different ships’ crews or local Tantopian gangs for the destructions, and all around them there rose the dreadful wail of grief that accompanied the discovery of the dead.

Vriska’s crew had grown painfully quiet.  Their ship was destroyed.  For all their incompetency, their hearts were alive and active, and they had loved that ship no less than Vriska.  When she finally looked up, she was the only one without tears in her eyes.  She looked at them, and they stared back, slowly realizing from the ferocity of her expression that she had a new iron in the fire.  And that iron, which consumed all other irons to form one gigantic red-hot stick of blazing metal, was the bloody revenge she would draw from whoever was responsible for the hell melting the frame of her ship.

“Newkon,” she barked, pushing past her blubbering crew with an intensity of purpose only pure emotion could create, “we have work to do.”

“Captain?” he asked, wiping his eyes and jogging to catch up with her.  The rest of her crew followed suit.

“We’re going to find the bastard that did this, and we are going to _make him pay_.  I don’t care if he’s a Laughssassin or a local drug lord.  I want all of you to gather as much information as possible.  Don’t disappoint me!”

They all responded to her command with a chorus of “Captain!” and slunk away, happy to have something to do with her plot for revenge.  She grabbed Newkon before he could disappear as well.  “Come with me,” she said.  He nodded and scrambled to keep up with her.

The city really was burning.  Panic had consumed it overnight, even the sections that had remained untouched by the rampage that had hit the slums and the docks.  Shops were closed, and those who dared to be out went to visit family and friends to gossip about the events of the night.  Confusion reigned.

Vriska reached out with her mind, using the best of her abilities to snag every susceptible person she felt as they marched.  Soon, she was leading an entire parade of trolls and natives towards the crime centers of the city.  It was in the state of disarray and chaos she expected to find it, and she stopped in its heart, allowing her unwilling followers to filter into the surrounding streets, taking position.

She didn’t warn Newkon before she reached into his mind, which was something she didn’t often do.  He slackened, and then he spoke, his own psychic ability warping the sound waves and projecting his voice loud and clear to all ends of the city.

“Listen up, bitches,” he said, channeling Vriska’s speech, “my ship has been destroyed, and I’m not okay with that!  If it’s a fight you want, then it’s a fight you got.  If you’re another pirate wanting trouble, you should have thought twice before crossing the crew of Second Scourge!  And if you’re a Laughssassin, here to do clean up for the Subjugglators...then you’d better go back to your clown worshipping masters and let them know that they should have sent an army!  Your work is far from done.  In fact, you’ve just pissed us off, and now we’re ready for war!  I’ll be waiting in the slums for you, whoever you are.  Let’s quit playing wiggler games and settle the score!”

She could hear the confusion rising around her as doors opened and people emerged, looking around for the source of the challenge.  She stood her ground and compelled her large army to do so as well.  She didn’t let emotion show on her face.  It struck her as a possibility that there was more than one Laughssassin, which was something she wasn’t sure she was prepared to face.  But as pirates and criminals looked up and down the street and saw her crowd standing and waiting, prepared to fight, they left the shops and pubs and shady entertainment establishments to stand with them.  Her army doubled in numbers and tripled in skill.

They waited there for a good while, hardly daring to relax.  The sounds that echoed from other parts of the slums suggested that the chaos engulfing the city hadn’t quieted, but the streets surrounding them were eerily silent, brimming with anticipation.  An hour passed, and then another.  She began to wonder if her challenge was going to be refused.

Then, suddenly, an object fell at her feet with a sickening squelch.  She heard Newkon gasp.  It was the severed head of their mechanic.

Everyone began to look around, searching for the source of the head.  Even as they looked, more heads began to lob into the street, among them the other members of her crew.  She stared dumbly at the face at her feet, which stared dumbly back, eyes wide and unblinking.  She looked at Newkon, who was holding the decapitated head of their linguist, trying hard not to hyperventilate.  Other people around her began to cry out and shout obscenities as they recognized the faces landing at their feet, but Vriska remained silent, the shock of the situation throbbing at her temples.

Finally, the anger began to bubble up, and it ripped through her body until she could hardly think.  “Come out, you coward!” she roared, reaching out with her mind with a vehemence she had only experienced on one other occasion in her life. 

She blazed through every mind in the vicinity, searching for her enemy.  It hit something dark and unholy. 

The mind she encountered gripped onto her, and she felt an overwhelming psychic backlash that sent violent shivers down her body.  She slipped to her knees, overcome by nausea and horror.  The presence in her mind warped her thoughts and drew out the grief and terror underlying the anger fueling her desire for revenge.  Her control on the people around her broke, and the crowd she had dragged into her army looked around, confused and disoriented, quickly becoming frightened and horrified by the scene that surrounded them.  More shouts filled the air, and those who had no idea what was happening began to lash out in panic, striking against the pirates and criminals that in their hysteria became their enemies.  The street erupted into violence, and still their true opponent had not emerged.

Vriska dragged herself into an alley, trying desperately to get ahold of her mind.  The dark pressure exerting itself against her continued to oppress her, making it impossible for her to regain control over her army.  She looked out, watching the violence turn into carnage through hazy eyes.  She shut them, trying to block out the horror but only finding worse images playing behind the dark of her eyelids.  When she opened them again, Newkon was kneeling next to her, yelling something.  His voice seemed to catch on a filter of cotton blocking the world from reaching her mind.

He looked at her and then over his shoulder at the massacre that had escalated far beyond rational thought, and, his face set, he pulled her arm over his shoulder and hoisted her to her feet.  He led her down the alley, both of them stumbling from her disorientation.  They picked their way through the backstreets until they were clear of the violence, which had branched to the surrounding neighborhoods.  The terrible noises followed them into quieter streets.

“Newkon,” Vriska said, gasping. The dark pressure was gradually leaving her mind. “Stop.”

He paused, glancing at her, and helped her sit at a curb.  She leaned over and set her head on her knees, dragging in deep, ragged breaths.  When she looked up, the world was almost normal again.

“Captain, what happened?”

“I don’t fucking know,” she said, bringing her natural hand up to message her temples.  “What the fuck was that?  My heeeeeeeead!”

He let her sit and cradle her head for a while longer, glancing over his shoulder.  Finally, when her breathing had become more even, he said, “Captain, we need to go...”

“Go where?  Back to the ship?  We’re _fucked_ , Newkon!  Our whole crew is _dead!_ ”

“I know, captain, I know, but we have to go somewhere else.  Anywhere else.”

“Fine,” she said, refusing to allow him to help her stand.  She shoved her hands into her pockets and started down the street, not at all sure of where she intended to go.  He followed her quietly.

They had walked in silence a few minutes when suddenly she stopped, a small chill shivering through her mind.  It almost sounded like the echo of a tiny _honk_.  She whipped around and immediately locked eyes with a Subjugglator leaning against the opening of a dark alleyway, a hood pulled over his head.

“... _Gamzee?_ ”

“What is it, captain?” Newkon asked, looking back.  But Gamzee had slipped into the alley, and by the time Vriska had rushed over, the only sign showing that he had been there was a horn resting on the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> [If you followed the link from chapter 5 of IDD to this fic, click here to proceed to chapter 6.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/629667/chapters/1235272)


End file.
